The Museum of Broken Relationships can be found in Zagreb, Croatia. It’s a new type of museum that is way more interested in the stories behind the objects than in the objects themselves. When I visited recently the audience was made up of all sorts of people, mostly, it has to be said, having a good time, judging by the laughter, despite the fact that much of the museum’s content is very poignant.
In the museum are displayed ordinary items which carry an extraordinary meaning to the people who donated them. For example, there is a wedding gown from Zagreb itself; the caption reads:

“After big words and little action, he spent more and more time talking and less and less time acting. I paid for it all fair and square: both my wedding gown and his bank loan.”

There is a postcard showing a man and woman sitting beside each other on the grass, with a handwritten inscription, from Yerevan, Armenia, donated by a (the?) woman, now 70 years old. She wrote:

“This is a postcard that was inserted through the slit of my door a long time ago by my neighbour’s son. He had been in love with me for three years. Following the old Armenian tradition, his parents came to our home to ask for my hand. My parents refused saying their son did not deserve me. They left angry and very disappointed. The same evening their son drove his car off a cliff.”

There is a single stiletto shoe from Amsterdam. The caption reads:

“It was 1959, I was ten, T. was eleven. We were very much in love… When I was fifteen we had more wonderful times together until he moved to Germany with his parents. Our goodbye came with many tears and promises. We would write every week and never marry anyone else.

“It was 1998 and I had just stopped working in prostitution. And that was when I recognised him: “T., is that you? He was startled and stood up. At once we were back in 1966. T. was now in his second marriage and he wanted to make it work. It was better we never saw each other again. After a few hours we said our goodbyes, and he asked: ‘Can I keep one of your stilettos as a memento?’ When he walked out the door, it felt like my stiletto-less foot was no longer mine.”

Star revenge item for me has to be ‘The toaster of vindication’, from Denver, Colorado. The caption reads:
“When I moved out, and across the country, I took the toaster. That’ll show you. How are you going to toast anything now?”

The series is from the text of a lecture I gave in May 2014 at Liverpool’s Institute of Cultural Capital research symposium entitled ‘The Arts, Them and Us: creating a more equitable system for subsidised culture’.

PART 5

So, what does the democratic museum look like? In its purest form the democratic museum has the following characteristics:

It attracts diverse audiences which are representative of society at large, through diverse programming which operates on many levels, including the emotional level, and these audiences have developed the social habit of using the museum regularly.

It places an emphasis on people and identity.

It has social goals and is socially responsible, because it understands that it is using public funds.

It involves the public in many ways, not solely as visitors, through consultation, advice and participation – it is integrated into the lives of its communities, it contains their voices, it is based on dialogue.

Its governance is not elitist, and is accountable to the public.

It is not afraid of controversy, debate and opinion; indeed, it welcomes these and encourages varied reactions; it may embrace political stances in a transparent manner; it may even fight for social justice.

It does not have admission charges, neither for permanent displays nor for special exhibitions, and therefore it does not have a two-tier system of access.

I could be describing the Museum of Liverpool, which opened to the public in 2011, has since been visited by almost 3 million people, and in 2012 was the most popular museum in England outside London.

We are in a city that I once described as one where “democracy has gone mad” – where opinions abound about everything. It was never an option to create anything other than a democratic museum, in this city, of this city, and to a degree by the people of this city, because they wouldn’t have allowed it – National Museums Liverpool would have been castigated in the Liverpool Echo and on Radio Merseyside. That’s true democracy.

And let’s be absolutely clear – the democratic museum, the Museum of Liverpool, is not anti-scholarship; not anti-collections; not anti-research; not anti-excellence; not anti-intellectual. In fact, the democratic museum demands scholarship, collections, research, excellence and intellectualism. We must not be deceived by people who claim that popularising museums means rejecting these things, who claim that democracy equals dumbing down, who claim that creating social value through access and inclusion is uncivilised.

I realised many years ago that no two museums are the same, and we cannot reduce the challenge of providing the museums society deserves to simplistic labels. The term ‘democratic museum’, though, is not merely a simplistic label; it refers to a museum that has a wide range of attitudes and approaches, that does not have an exclusive and narrow role.

Different types of museum can be democratic. What they will share is a belief in the entitlement of the whole of society to the benefits museums can provide, and a determination to take positive action to deliver that entitlement.

But for those people who celebrate the democratisation of British museums, and who delight in the fact that museums are becoming places that everyone can use and benefit, regardless of their background, beware, because there is a backlash under way.

Six years ago we saw the publication of the McMaster Report, commissioned by the then Labour Government. The Report argued that we ought to stop all the measurement nonsense that required cultural organisations to prove their social relevance by, for example, showing that they had an appeal to diverse audiences, and return to a culture of judgement, where “excellence” is all that counts.

This was a clear attempt to turn back the tide of broader social relevance, and promised a return to the days of our being preoccupied with comfortable inputs rather than difficult outcomes; an attempt to take the spotlight away from the needs and views of museum audiences, a spotlight some of us have fought hard for in the teeth of indifference, contempt and hostility.

What I said at the time was:

“If the report encourages reactionary and undemocratic forces to scuttle back into the shadows and lose all over again a sense of responsibility for delivering social value to the whole of the public, dressed up as delivering excellence, then the report will have done the public no favours, and government will have scored a spectacular own goal.”

I believe that this is exactly what happened and now, as everyone’s budgets are under severe pressure, what is sought from publicly-funded organisations isn’t so much evidence of social impact, as evidence of our ability to offset public expenditure, and to attract overseas tourists.

The current obsession with tourism is very alarming. It seems that providing an affordable and life-enriching cultural service to British taxpayers has become subordinate to making as much money as possible from overseas tourists. There’s nothing wrong with a policy that encourages overseas tourists, but there is something very wrong when we appear to have no other policy. This commercialisation of our culture is depressing, and it does not strike me as the intelligent policy for cultural activity that is needed if cultural organisations are to play their part in ensuring we have a healthy, well-educated society – helping promote the “national good”.

If we are to attain this we need brave, intelligent politicians who are strong enough to set social agendas that do not fall prey to the exclusivity that is part of the DNA of many cultural organisations.

I would like to end with a quote from a Scouser, which if I were being unkind I might suggest puts me in mind of the attitude of many of our great cultural organisations to the public:

What follows is the fourth of a five part series looking at museums and democracy, this time explaining how museums failed to respond effectively to the rise of the working classes. The series is from the text of a lecture I gave in May 2014 at Liverpool’s Institute of Cultural Capital research symposium entitled ‘The Arts, Them and Us: creating a more equitable system for subsidised culture’.

Part 4

In a country where four million children are living in poverty, in families which struggle to afford basic things like healthy food, school uniforms and shoes, in families which don’t have books or computers, or the £10, £12 or £15 for admission to a museum exhibition; where in some areas more than 30% of children have parents who are unemployed and claiming benefits; where a child in a northern city will live several years less than a child in a wealthy London suburb, it is a gross misrepresentation to claim that we do not have a host of social issues to resolve which are based on inequality and class differences.

Ultimately, we simply cannot ignore the failure of museums to respond effectively to the rise of the working classes during the 20th century. This failure has left us struggling as an entire sector to demonstrate our widespread social relevance. This failure has led to our being viewed by society at large as elitist, and quite justly.

I don’t intend to labour the point about the success of 20th century museums in attracting the middle classes and virtually no-one else. There is plenty of evidence.

I contend that this neglect of a large proportion of the population was a result of a failure by the museum establishment to accept any responsibility for providing social value to working class people. The idea of providing value to the whole of the public in return for public funding just does not seem to have been in the museum psyche.

In failing in this way museums fell off the pace of social reform and transformation during the 20th century. It was not until the past three decades that we have seen museums begin to shape up in this respect, as changes in the museum workforce began to impact on attitudes, thus paving the way for a flowering of the democratic museum.

Nonetheless, there still are apologists for the narrow appeal of museums.

What we see time and again is a conflation of the idea of a popular museum, one that has a broad social appeal, with that of the ruination of something that needs to be cherished. Art critics are particularly partial to this tactic, and the volume of bluster brought on by popular exhibitions often reaches deafening proportions. Someone is being betrayed. I’m never sure who it is, but it’s probably people who would rather museums were empty, or at least devoid of people from the toiling classes.

A good example of this is: “…a museum is supposed to be a space for contemplation, not throngs”. Who said so? Actually the Chief Art Critic of The Times (The Times, 2 July 2008), though I am unclear exactly what authority she thought she had for claiming this on behalf of the public at large who provide the funding for our public museums.

I find it interesting that when critics attack popular exhibitions, they usually begin by railing against what they see as the vacuous content, then give the real game away, in the blink of an eye, by castigating the audiences the exhibitions attract.

I give merely my favourite example, which is 17 years old, but I promise that these sentiments prosper to this day: after we opened the Art on Tyneside display at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, I still recall the venom hurled at the display by art critics, one of whom wrote the following, which I never tire of quoting:

“It was clear from comments in the visitors’ book that, with some sectors of the public, Art on Tyneside has been popular. I suppose one must accept this. If some visitors are so unimaginative that they need half-baked gimmicks to make history come alive, then by all means let them have them. But not in an art museum…

“It is the policy of the Laing to make art more accessible to the people” reads a large notice at the entrance to the museum…Yes, but accessible to which people? Not, certainly, to those who are interested in fine art.”

The lack of interest in or understanding of the audiences for exhibitions like these, and the contempt shown for these audiences, could be dismissed as laughable eccentricity or journalistic hyperbole, but it makes me very angry.

Every Sunday I receive a colour supplement, the arts review pages of which are full of pretentious, insider claptrap about highbrow culture. This is the sneering voice of a spoiled and privileged elite, which is unwilling to countenance the idea that not everyone has had the benefit of their upbringing and education, not everyone shares their tastes, not everyone wants to enjoy their culture in an atmosphere of reverential silence, surrounded by no-one other than snobby art critics.

A few years ago, in an obscure paper entitled Positioning the museum for social inclusion, I tried to get to grips with what I saw as a knowing and deliberate approach to keep museums exclusive. I described this approach as the Great Museum Conspiracy.

I considered four factors: who has run museums, what they contain, the way they have been run, and for whom. I saw at the heart of the Great Museum Conspiracy a power system which during the 20th century, ignored and therefore betrayed working class people, and betrayed the concept of the democratic museum.

I still see this power system in play, though I do believe that we are shifting into the era of the democratic museum through the combination of factors I considered in that paper.

This is the third of a five part series looking at museums and democracy, this time considering changes in the perception and identity of the working classes over the last 200 years. The series is from the text of a lecture I gave in May 2014 at Liverpool’s Institute of Cultural Capital research symposium entitled ‘The Arts, Them and Us: creating a more equitable system for subsidised culture’.

Part 3

Many decades were to pass before a combination of developments opened the way for museums to come to resemble democratic institutions. I will come to that shortly, but first let’s look at the c-word – “class”, a term with which we really are never comfortable in museums or, indeed, in the cultural sector as a whole.

There are those who believe we are now a classless society, though only people who know nothing of council estate life in Liverpool or Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle, or London, could subscribe confidently to this view.

What is true is that since the 1960s class distinctions have blurred, and traditional social class bonds have weakened. This process of democratic transformation has occurred during the lifetime of all the people in this room – which might explain why talk of class differences may sound to some no more relevant, or inconvenient, than the Spanish Armada.

It would be anachronistic to describe the “lower orders” prior to 1800 as “working class”, but from the 1820s this term came into popular use, as the new manufacturing society grew. From the 1850s the typical Briton was an industrial worker, and the first working class MPs, both miners, were elected in 1874. By 1900 the working classes had become a respectable sector of political society.

The working classes were diverse in nature, with skilled workers at one end of the spectrum, and people living in abject poverty at the other. In 1918 they were mostly manual workers employed in manufacturing. Working conditions were harsh and long, housing was poor, there was really no state system of secondary education for other than a small minority; welfare services were limited.

Over the next five decades or so there was a steady improvement in the material condition of the working classes, with a growing standard of living, improving housing, better health, more education and the coming of the welfare state.

Security of employment grew too, though real poverty and social distress were, of course, never banished. Politically the working classes saw further change, with six governments formed by the Labour Party between 1918 and 1974, and the growth of the influence of the trade union movement.

These developments led to what some have described as a decline of the working classes, or, put another way, the loss of a distinctive working class identity. As incomes have moved towards equalisation, and as the numbers working in manual roles have declined, we have seen a homogenisation of living standards, perhaps even an embourgeoisement of the working classes.

The mass unemployment which returned after the mid-‘70s, added to the growth in the numbers of married women going out to work, led to a deepening fissure between those who were still earning and other groups – unemployed people, old people, single parent families, unemployed ethnic minorities.

This social polarisation created what some commentators have referred to as a new social underclass. The enterprise culture of Thatcherism deepened this social fissure even further, and the notion of the solidarity of the working classes evaporated.

The loss of authority of the trade union movement (and to this day fierce critics of the Thatcher regime can be found commending the destruction of trade union power during the ’80s) and the sheer unelectability of the Labour Party both shifted the perceptions of the working classes, and led directly to the evolution of New Labour – a political party which consciously stopped promoting itself as the party of the working classes.

As unemployment reduced again in the ‘90s and in the early years of the 21st century, we found ourselves in an evolving social and political landscape, one where, despite the survival of working class sentiment, it became ever more difficult to speak of the working classes and their cultures and preoccupations, though we are happy to use the term ‘popular culture’, which to all intents and purposes has supplanted the term working class culture, while meaning much the same thing.

Part four of this series of blog posts looking at democracy and museums will appear next week.

]]>http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/06/how-class-distinctions-have-become-blurred/feed/0Are museums for the people or just the elite?http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/06/dr-david-fleming-are-museums-for-the-people-or-just-the-elite/
http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/06/dr-david-fleming-are-museums-for-the-people-or-just-the-elite/#commentsMon, 09 Jun 2014 16:48:03 +0000http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/?p=5297

This is the second of a five part series looking at museums and democracy, this time looking at the early days of UK museums. Were they built for the enlightenment of the people? or were they just private clubs for the ruling classes? The series is from the text of a lecture I gave in May 2014 at Liverpool’s Institute of Cultural Capital research symposium entitled ‘The Arts, Them and Us: creating a more equitable system for subsidised culture’.

Part 2

I have been interested in the notion of the democratic museum for many years. Indeed, it was because I believed that they are democratic institutions that I started working in museums in 1981.

I had developed a rose-tinted view of museums on our family visits in the 1950s to Kirkstall Abbey and the Abbey House Museum in Leeds, two bus rides away on the other side of the city, where we marvelled at the Victorian street scene and the displays of old toys, and activated the Murder in the Museum automaton; and on a single visit to Leeds City Museum with my father, where an unfeasibly large spider from Leeds Market, a scary tiger and a coal mine accessed through a trapdoor in the floor, made a big impression.

Of course I found out many years later that it wasn’t a real coal mine at all, but simply part of the cellar painted black, with mirrors. I have found it difficult to trust museums ever since…

Encouraged by these childhood adventures, having passed my 11-Plus examination and gone to Grammar School, then University, I got it into my head that I could use my history qualifications to empower working class people. Stupid boy!

My basic misunderstanding about museums was that I thought they were places where people like my parents and sister, who were brought up in rented back-to-back houses with shared toilets along the street; who had a bath once a week in a zinc container in front of the coal fire, using the same water as the previous family member who had used it; who lived in houses without books; who left school with no qualifications and with a limited confidence in their own intellectual capacity; could discover new avenues to learning and self-improvement.

In my naivety, I had got the idea that these great public institutions had been created for that end. I realised when I began to work in museums that I was being delusional. I realised that museums were dominated by elitists who didn’t share my views.

Many of our museums were founded in the middle and later decades of the 19th century. Among the complex motivations was the perceived need to provide to the new industrial working classes opportunities to extend their knowledge, thereby to encourage responsible citizenry.

The popularity of Mechanics’ Institutes’ educational programmes, devised specifically for industrial workers, stimulated public interest in the notion of museums. Government even went so far as to enable municipal authorities to provide museums, in 1845. Thereafter followed a rush of municipal museum foundations.

It is interesting at least, and no coincidence, I fear, that so many museums were created precisely at the time when there was determined resistance to creating a more democratic political system. Many of our museums – and the same can be said for all those created right up until the First World War – were created by a society which was dominated by a small, rich, educated elite, where the majority of the adult population had no say whatsoever in the governance of the country, and where concessions to democracy had to be forced unwillingly out of the governing class, who gave way in a spirit no nobler than that of self-preservation.

Ostensibly, many of these foundations were for the benefit of the industrial working classes, but I suspect that in actuality, right from their earliest days, museums thought and ran themselves more like private clubs than public institutions founded for the benefit of the masses.

Museums may have been set up in an atmosphere of enlightenment, but this does not mean that they were democratic in nature, and I believe that exclusivity is in their DNA.

Part three of this series of blog posts looking at democracy and museums will appear later this week.

]]>http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/06/dr-david-fleming-are-museums-for-the-people-or-just-the-elite/feed/2How we British aren’t particularly good at democracy…http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/05/dr-david-fleming-we-british-arent-particularly-good-at-democracy/
http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/05/dr-david-fleming-we-british-arent-particularly-good-at-democracy/#commentsFri, 23 May 2014 14:12:48 +0000http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/?p=5167

This is the first of a five part series looking at museums and democracy. What follows is the text of a lecture I gave on 13 May 2014 at Liverpool’s Institute of Cultural Capital research symposium entitled ‘The Arts, Them and Us: creating a more equitable system for subsidised culture’.

The Democratic Museum – an oxymoron?

Part 1

I’d like to begin by quoting Chekhov, who was in turn quoted in the Preface of the book The Uses of Literacy by the late Richard Hoggart, like me, a native of Leeds:

There is peasant blood in my veins, and you cannot astonish me with peasant virtues.

Contrary to popular opinion, we British aren’t particularly good at democracy. We have actually only been a democracy for 96 years, and that’s stretching a point. In 1918 the British electorate grew from 8.4 million to 21.4 million, though while all men aged over 21 henceforth had the vote, women had to wait until they were aged 30.

Moreover, the 1918 Representation of the People Act hardly signalled a breakthrough for democracy in terms of the hostility of the governing elite. Former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith wrote in 1920 of:

these damned women voters…dim…impenetrable…for the most part hopelessly ignorant of politics, credulous to the last degree, and flickering with gusts of sentiment like a candle in the wind.

The voting age was equalised for both sexes in 1928, adding 5 million more damned women voters to the electoral roll.

Before we congratulate ourselves too heartily for these reforms it is worth reminding ourselves that in terms of female representation in Parliament Britain still does rather less well than 64 other nations, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda and Uganda.

Modern British national democracy essentially gives no more power to people than to vote for MPs every few years, and it is built upon a political party system which offers menus of policies in the form of manifestos. The ability of the citizenry at large to make their voices heard is strictly limited.

Moreover, in the 1980s central government effectively emasculated local democracy in the shape of local government. Between 1979 and 1994 no fewer than 150 Acts of Parliament were passed removing powers from local authorities, with £24 billion a year (at 1994 prices) transferred to unelected agencies such as Development Corporations.

We may agree that our democracy is preferable to authoritarianism, but let’s not pretend that, other than in our enjoyment of freedom of speech, it is much other than a rather watery brew, with a passive form of citizenship.

My contention is that the fragile nature of British democracy has profoundly affected the development of museums and has blighted the creation of a democratic museum sector in this country.

More to follow.

]]>http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/05/dr-david-fleming-we-british-arent-particularly-good-at-democracy/feed/0Remembering Dorothy Kuyahttp://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/01/dorothy-kuya-1931-2013/
http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/01/dorothy-kuya-1931-2013/#commentsThu, 02 Jan 2014 14:43:25 +0000http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/?p=4074Today I’d like to pay tribute to leading anti-racism campaigner Dorothy Kuya who died following a short illness on 23 December, 2013. Dorothy’s impact and influence stretched far beyond the L8 streets were she was raised.

Dorothy was one of life’s big characters. When I first came to Liverpool as Director of National Museums Liverpool in 2001 I was told that Dorothy wanted to meet me, and this was put to me in such a way that a) I had better not refuse, and b) I had better be on my guard because she’s tricky!

In fact, Dorothy wanted to find out about me and to establish whether or not I was likely to be an ally in combatting racism. As it happens, we always got on very well, and I remember how touched I was to be invited to her 80th birthday celebration in March 2013. I shall always treasure the card she sent me, with the photograph of herself as a baby. But she certainly kept me on my toes.

There are two things I shall remember about her primarily: first, she said what she thought – she held strong views, she was outspoken and she feared no-one; and secondly, she acted as a conscience for all those of us in public life in Liverpool – for me, Dorothy was one of those people of whom I think when considering what decision to make: “what would Dorothy think, what would Dorothy want me to do?” would often pass through my mind when International Slavery Museum business was on the agenda. So, should we invite Martin Luther King III to Slavery Remembrance Day? What would Dorothy think?

I once read somewhere that one of Dorothy’s proudest moments was the opening of the International Slavery Museum in 2007. She never said that to me, but I remember thinking that this was the best possible endorsement of the Museum, and I was so pleased that we had actually done something of which Dorothy was proud!

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that Dorothy was dogmatic. She was tough and passionate, yes. She was a courageous fighter.

But she was also kind, thoughtful and generous; and she was pragmatic – she understood that sometimes you’ll make more real progress by giving way on the small things, and that you should save your real energies for the big things.

I admired Dorothy and I shall miss her. Liverpool will be a poorer place without her.

You can read more about Dorothy in this tribute by writer Angela Cobbinah.

Some of the Hillsborough related objects on display at the Museum of Liverpool

I attended the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards on Sunday 15 December (my wife Alison is a BBC Trustee).
By far the best part was the award of the Helen Rollason Award to Hillsborough campaigner Anne Williams. There were shouts of “Justice” and the whole audience stood in tribute (which they hadn’t done for any award or ‘sports personality’ up to that point). Sue Johnston gave a very moving monologue that had the Leeds crowd enraptured.

What Anne Williams and other Hillsborough campaigners have shown is that you don’t have to be high status or high profile to make a difference, and that wrongdoers can be made accountable by ordinary people who are brave, and who can find their voice.

One of the problems with modern society, obsessed as it is with celebrity and status, is that many people seem to have no say in things. Well that’s not entirely true – we all do have a voice, it’s just that sometimes it’s hard to be heard.

Anne Williams and the Hillsborough campaigners have shown what can happen when people find their voice. She and they insisted they be heard, and eventually they were.

It’s an outrage that being heard took so long, but last night’s award in front of a national audience of many millions, was proof that we all have to try to find the courage to stand up and be counted when we believe something is wrong. Justice for the 96.

On Friday I had the pleasure of attending two debates by schoolchildren at the International Slavery Museum (ISM) as part of the Children’s Commissioner’s Takeover Day. It was also the occasion of the launch of the ISM’s new Teachers’ Guide to the Legacies of Transatlantic Slavery.

The two debates were: “We believe that racist memorabilia and objects such as golliwogs should not be used in everyday life” and “We believe that all of those who acquire British citizenship should follow the British way of life”.

I have to say, both my forecasts for the voting proved to be wrong. The children decided that racist memorabilia should NOT be banned, and that newcomers to Britain should NOT have to follow the “British way of life”.

The basic reasoning for the result of the vote on golliwogs etc was that the children felt that banning such items itself could be considered racist (why not ban white dolls, or Barbie dolls?). Clearly, the children were expressing anti-racist attitudes.

They questioned what “British way of life” means, and beyond thinking that everyone who lives in Britain probably ought to be able to understand English, the children were very much of the “live and let live” persuasion, that diversity of experience should be celebrated, not suppressed.

In many ways the debates were uplifting and life-affirming. Thanks to the children from St Mary’s College, Rainhill High School, Broadgreen Primary School, St Oswald’s Primary School, Our Lady Immaculate Primary School, Holly Lodge, St Austin’s Primary School, St Gregory’s Primary School and Pinehurst Primary School for uplifting the adults who were there.

And if any of you read this, I forgive you for deliberately covering up my face with copies of the Teachers’ Guides when we had our photos taken together, and I’m sorry I called you “little rats”…

This week lots of NML staff have been busy at the UK Museums Association’s annual conference, held this year in Liverpool. We are told this was the biggest ever

MA conference (and it’s been around for more then 100 years!) and possibly the best, with lots of topical sessions.

MA President David Anderson, who is Director General of National Museum Wales and host to the 2014 conference in Cardiff, said that the Liverpool conference:

“Was the most successful MA conference ever – or at least that I have attended. The programme had real bite, was intensely topical, and gave space for debate for many of the most pressing issues that the museum sector is currently facing. It was also a great success in terms of numbers and national profile. Everyone that I spoke to was buzzing with enthusiasm, and that included overseas delegates.”

Among my favourite moments were the launch of the Social Justice Alliance of Museums (see forthcoming blog) and presentations by Judith Vandervelde of the Jewish Museum and Phil Sayers (artist), both of whom were addressing the subject of emotion in museums.

Better still were the answers to the Great Scousetastic Quiz questions from a multi-ethnic Balkan team; their answers bore little relation to the questions, eg “The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back”, “The Balkan Who Loved Me” and “Sarajevo Rangers” (no, me neither), but they seemed to have fun putting traditional Balkan tensions behind them!